Texas House returns with largest contingent of new members in 40 years

Jonathan Tilove @JTiloveTX

Wednesday

Jan 16, 2013 at 12:01 AMSep 26, 2018 at 11:16 PM

State Rep.-elect Jonathan Stickland is 29. He left high school early and got a GED. He had never held or run for office before. His local elected officialdom was virtually unanimous in its preference for his Republican primary opponent. If he has a charisma it’s in his super-ordinariness. And he doesn’t even have the "r" in his last name that everyone assumes is supposed to be there.

And there, in brief, are the keys to Stickland’s stunning success. Every strike against him, he marvels, turned out to be an advantage in what turned out to be a crushing, 20-point primary victory. Each provided a way for people to remember and identify with him. He just had to own it, live it, be it.

Now, Stickland is one of the reasons why the new Texas House, when it convenes Tuesday for its biennial session, will be swollen with freshman – 43 in all. Together with 24 sophomores, the new and the near-new will make up close to half the 150 members of the House.

"It’s an incredible number," said James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas.

Much of that has to do with places like Stickland’s home turf – Tarrant County – a tea party stronghold where voters gave one well-tenured Republican after another the boot.

Said Stickland, "Tarrant County lost a lot of seniority in this wave – Northeast Tarrant Tea Party. They won every single race they endorsed in."

So, as Stickland proclaimed to huzzahs at a well-attended NE Tarrant Tea Party gathering in December, "Tarrant County just sent the most conservative group down to Austin that this state has ever seen."

And Stickland said in an interview, "I plan on having the most conservative voting record in the entire House of Representatives."

About 30 miles and a political world away, in the tony North Dallas district he will represent (he can count former President George W. Bush as a constituent) in the new Legislature, Jason Villalba offers a more circumspect preview of his tenure.

"I’m a different type of conservative," said Villalba, a man of elegant bearing. "I was able to win as what I call a Reagan conservative, not any less conservative than those gentleman and women in Fort Worth, but I am more concerned about constituent issues than in partisan politics, about helping people – transportation, water, public education, electricity, bread and butter issues — not issues that galvanize."

In his narrow runoff victory, Villalba said, "we focused on people, not partisanship, and that was refreshing to a lot of people. Friends in other parts of the state like to talk about issues that are a little more divisive and more interesting. I’m not interested in those issues."

But Villalba, a merger and acquisitions lawyer with Haynes and Boone, is not without ambitions to make an early mark. "It’s an interesting time to be serving," he said. "With freshmen and sophomores nearly half of the membership, we’re going to have opportunities to lead on important issues early."

In their different demeanors and approaches, Stickland and Villalba nicely encapsulate the two broad camps of the new freshman class.

According to Rice University political scientist Mark Jones, who closely tracks legislative behavior, the addition of a few more Democrats to the House minority, and the replacement of some veteran Republicans with more conservative folks like Stickland, will leave the House collectively in about the same spot it was ideologically in the last session. But the Republican caucus, where most of the action is, will be further to the right.

It is hard to know what vocabulary to apply to the two broad GOP camps. Jones uses the terms "movement conservative" and "establishment conservative." While "establishment" might carry a musty air, the alternatives – "moderate," "pragmatic," "centrist," – are now clearly, in the modern Republican lexicon, pejorative.

GOP members, Jones said, exist along a continuum. There are those who love the tea party, those who just like it, those who loathe it but fear its wrath, and those, like Villalba, who feel comfortable in politely maintaining their distance.

Stickland and his band consider themselves Davids who can defeat the Goliaths of better-funded opponents. But Jones said they will find that the moneyed Republican interests will tolerate their politics only to the extent that it doesn’t interfere with business, and then, those tea party members must contemplate the cost, in terms of their political future, of their ideas.

Jerry Madden, a powerful legislator from Plano who has just retired after 20 years in the House, said there is no way to suss out before a session, or even after a single session, who the stars of the new class will be. "It takes two or three sessions to determine who will be a good legislator and, every once in a while, a statesman," Madden said.

But every mother thinks their child is a prodigy, and those who contributed to the success of Stickland and Villalba believe each is destined for greatness.

"Jason’s not your typical freshman," said Trey Newton, who runs the Hispanic Republicans of Texas political action committee. "He’s going to be an impact player from Day One."

Indeed, while he was elected from a mostly Anglo district, Villalba, a Latino Republican rising star, appears tailor-made for bigger things.

"I didn’t run as an Hispanic," he said. "I ran as someone dedicated to my district’s schools and transportation needs. I didn’t talk about my being Hispanic. Obviously, Villalba’s my last name, I’ve got dark hair and dark eyes. Of course I’m Hispanic, but I don’t think that’s relevant. What is relevant is my dedication, my resume."

But, he acknowledged, at a time when Republicans nationally are trying to figure how to broaden their appeal to Hispanic voters, "Texas is a laboratory for the rest of the country, and I’m a unique data point in this laboratory."

Stickland was "discovered" by Julie McCarty, president of the board of the NE Tarrant Tea Party, who was especially impressed with the way he confronted U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Flower Mound, at a town hall meeting after Burgess voted in 2011 to raise the debt limit.

"Jonathan was so well spoken, and it wasn’t just that he had good points to make. They were so well-thought out and easy to understand," said McCarty. "It was truly the voice of the people."

"Honestly, I never considered running until I got an email from Julie McCarty at 11:45 at night, sitting in front of my home computer eating a bowl of ice cream," recalled Stickland. "My wife was leaning over me and started laughing. Then she said, ‘Crap, you might be able to do that.’"

Stickland, who used to work as an exterminator and is now an oil and gas consultant, prayed on it and decided to run. His initial survey, he said, found only two voters knew who he was. "I knocked on 7,112 doors myself," he said. He lost 50 pounds.

Henson said the danger of such a large incoming class is not just the loss of institutional knowledge but that a group of new legislators, who consider the system "rotted from within," might arrive with "contempt for institutional knowledge."

"Well, I’ll tell you," said Stickland, "we’ve been preparing for this session. We’re going to blow their socks off with how prepared we are. We have the whole rule book marked up."

As he declared before the Tarrant tea partyers in December, "This group has been working for months now in learning the processes, learning the rules, learning how the committee process is set up. We’ve got to show it on Jan. 8. It’s time to do battle. It is time to fight for conservative values. We have to be willing to draw the line in the sand."

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